Oracle Cloud deleting active user accounts without possibility for data recovery
46 comments
·February 1, 2025kwanbix
That people continue to use ORACLE products is one of those misteries I can not understand for much thought that I put into it.
dijit
There have been many times where I have tried to warn people on HN not to get into bed with Oracle.[0][1][2][3]
But people have a hard time resisting free stuff.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33199750
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38075210
StressedDev
You had a bad experience with Oracle and I get that. They didn't treat you well. However, not everyone has a bad experience with them and a lot of companies make mistakes and treat customers poorly. The question is not did it happen, the question is how often does it happen and how does the organization handle it. If Oracle has millions of customers and you are the only one they harmed, they are probably doing great. If your experience is a rare occurrence (say it occurs to 1% or 0.5% of customers), then everyone should avoid Oracle because they don't know if or when they will be the next victim.
In the OP's case, I have several comments:
- Companies should always be able to explain why an account was closed. If the person violated a policy, the exact line or paragraph of the policy should be given to the customer along with a detailed explanation of how the customer violated the policy.
- Companies should always notify customers when they close an account or when a customer is violating the terms of service. These notices should clearly explain what the customer did and should explain how they violated a policy.
- Companies should expect their automated systems and employees to make mistakes. They should rectify mistakes when they are found.
I think Oracle treated dijit and the OP horribly. I think Oracle should do a root cause analysis to determine why they misbehaved, fix the problem, reinstate the account (assuming the OP is telling the truth), and publicly apologize. Internally, Oracle should learn from this and fix their processes and communications.
marcosdumay
We are still talking about Oracle, right? That company that just a few years ago decided to sue all of their customers, worldwide, for whatever terms from their one-sided policies they decided were violated? The one that actually lost almost every time somebody took them to court, but insisted on doing it anyway?
The one that got the manager responsible sacked, but is still managed by the same CEO (and owner) that appointed him?
dijit
There are so many cases where Oracle have acted in bad faith that I don’t think defending them is the right move.
“Don’t anthropomorphise the lawnmower”.
Let us not forget that they bankrupted the second largest city in the UK, it’s hardly an isolated incident.
They are exactly as evil as people say, I know its hard to reason, there’s always shades of grey after all, but I know of know of no other consistently one-dimensional company.
belter
I am not sure if you realize how evil Oracle is. Using them should be a firing offense. They are law firm with an IT department...
cyberax
> However, not everyone has a bad experience with them
Examples? I know several large companies that spent tens of millions to get _away_ from Oracle.
Retric
> not everyone has a bad experience with them
You don’t stay in business for long while burning every single bridge.
The standards for acceptable behavior from a supplier / business partner are a little higher than just doesn’t fuck over every single contract.
belter
This as been posted here in at least 60 occasions...But clearly not enough times..: https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=1982
marcosdumay
It's cheap. And its free tier is really large.
And after that stops applying, you have spent a huge amount of work managing your software around their idiosyncrasies. So doing the same for another supplier looks like a huge (probably unsurmountable) task.
jeroenhd
They have an excellent free tier for experimenting with some higher power ARM servers. As long as you're ready to give up when they decide they don't like you any more, that's a pretty cool deal. Just don't ever build anything with their hardware or software that you'd like to keep.
Edit: Java is usually pretty good, too. At least the open source stuff. Maybe stuff like GraalVM too but they had that locked down in licenses for a while and I don't trust Oracle at all.
Daviey
I've been trying to sign up to them for over a year, and it keeps failing. Support tickets remain unanswered.
7thpower
Sadly, I have been unable to secure one of those higher power free servers. I’ve been trying for a couple weeks now.
That was literally the only reason I was willing to give Oracle a shot.
crayonista
Yeah, I have a free-tier ARM VM, and it's great as a remote Nix builder for aarch64.
If I lost it, I'd just have to do building locally.
joshuaissac
To be fair, shutting things down without notice is not something Oracle is known for.
Usually, they just increase prices by a lot once the customer is locked in.
echelon
You definitely don't want to be on Oracle cloud then.
Stay far away from Stargate.
ndsipa_pomu
In general, I agree but there's a lot of people "locked-in" to using their products so once a poor decision has been made, it's costly to move away from them.
I signed up a personal Oracle Cloud account to make use of their always-free tier of VMs. I was lucky to be able to get 4 of the VM.Standard.A1.Flex instances which have been running fine for a couple of years now. I've heard various tales of people on the free tier getting instances/accounts deleted for having idle instances, but presumably my backup of them is enough to stop them from being registered as idle (I've got a couple of websites running on them too, but they're just for my use).
bastardoperator
I find it interesting that Tiktok went with Oracle given their history with the CIA.
NewJazz
There was political pressure. Still there.
7thpower
I think it was more that Oracle was willing to take the political risk and had a lot of incentive to land a large, high visibility client that could help them build economies of scale and would come with a tier 1 JV partner.
There is a lot of upside for Oracle based on their position relative to others and Ellison does not have to manage his political capital the same way non-founder CEOs do (he made this move long before Trump’s second term).
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2
Honestly, I have never been in a position to see their salespeople so I have to assume they must be wining and dining the bosses first, because in my little corner of the universe, every single like entity uses them to some degree. I personally do not understand it.
latchkey
OP is suggesting it is in retaliation for a criticizing viral post...
epakai
He also points out his own accusation is baseless:
https://mastodon.de/@ErikUden/113930295586771514
and a longer explanation of his thoughts (mostly that Oracle has left him in the dark so all he can offer is conspiratorial speculation)
https://mastodon.de/@ErikUden/113930279621469673
Anyway, since Oracle won't say, it seems fine to take adverse inference.
mgdev
I was charged $5k due to a bug on Oracle's side.
I initially escalated to support. Similar thing - they said there was nothing they could do, and that I needed to cut a ticket to another team... one which I couldn't contact. They simply closed the ticket.
I did a chargeback for that portion of my bill. TBD whether they will nuke my account or not.
nubinetwork
One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison strikes again... but for the life of me, I don't understand why this guy isn't calling his credit card company to cancel payments for a service he's not receiving...
bluesounddirect
hey how else are they going to make space for project stargate! your data has been deported.
RobGR
Ever since seeing this talk https://archive.org/details/youtube-eXe-rvXVL-g , whenever I see these stories of kafkaesque incidents, I am reminded that there is a common way to describe all of them -- the lack of due process.
JaggerFoo
This happened to me when Oracle first started in the cloud business. I actively avoid doing business with their cloud services.
hosteur
Perhaps related to this? https://www.reddit.com/r/oracle/comments/1hsjxz9/oci_what_ac...
that_guy_iain
That has to be breach of contract. The guy was a paying customer and never missed a payment.
I highly suspect this is caused by a bug.
RobGR
If it was caused by a bug they wouldn't have told him "you have no future with oracle" and that he couldn't create a new account -- they would have just created a new account, apologized, and given him a few months credit.
that_guy_iain
It on the Terms of Service, it said customers are only eligible to sign up once. Which sounds like something in the terms of service. They didn't say you're banned from using the service but instead said people are only eligible to sign up once.
I've never really mentioned it elsewhere, but the last time I even considered doing something with oracle was I believe when they released the free-tier arm instance and I was just going to compile some of my projects to arm to see if they worked well.
Well since I'm not in the business of trusting a lot of corporations I decided to use a privacy.com virtual card that only had a one time transaction and would close afterwards. Well after signing up and starting the instance and doing some quick tests. I ended up coming back to it a bit later and found out the account was just out right terminated. After a while of going through support and looking around at what logs I could get, turns out they tried to do a $0.01 charge on the card and since it failed marked the card as stolen (or something similar.) And even with a long conversation with support they told me there was literally nothing that could be done, not even with proof of identification or anything. Even making a new account didn't work since something was matching and they were rejecting me making a new account (don't know if it was address, ip or my name.)
At this point I share the opinion that others here are sharing, no matter the reason never work with oracle. I'm just lucky they made the decision for me and I never even have to consider the choice again.